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Thursday, March 29, 2018





[Morning Rounds by Megan Thielking]





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Happy Thursday, everyone! I'm here to get you ahead of the day's news in science and medicine.





Trump fires VA Secretary David Shulkin



President Trump has ousted VA secretary David Shulkin, after weeks of uncertainty about Shulkin’s future in the administration. Shulkin played a role in passing several bills to improve services for veterans, including a measure to make it easier for veterans to apply for disability benefits. But Shulkin had also come under fire for his spending, including on a 10-day trip to Europe last summer that government oversight officials found led to a "misuse of VA resources." He’s also sparred with the president’s appointees within the agency. Trump plans to nominate the White House physician, Dr. Ronny L. Jackson, for the role.





Lawmakers hope to bring opioid legislation to vote before Memorial Day



A key House committee is slated to hold the last of three major hearings to address the opioid crisis on April 11 — and hopes to bring legislation up for a vote before the House breaks for Memorial Day on May 24, according to GOP aides on Capitol Hill. “It’s part of our bipartisan, comprehensive effort to deliver relief to every American community, which continues to battle this costly epidemic,” Rep. Greg Walden (R-Ore.), the chairman of the House Energy & Commerce Committee, told STAT in a statement. "Time is of the essence and we are working across the aisle to get legislation to the President’s desk as quickly as possible.” STAT's Lev Facher has the details here<https://statnews.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f8609630ae206654824f897b6&id=c199de8598&e=4aad33fd68>.





NIDA director calls for new thinking on addiction treatment



Dr. Nora Volkow, who heads up the NIH’s National Institute on Drug Abuse, is calling<https://statnews.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f8609630ae206654824f897b6&id=2362823fa4&e=4aad33fd68> for a new approach to governing the approval of treatments for opioid use disorders — and, in turn, speed things up a little. As the opioid crisis worsens, researchers are racing to come up with new medications to treat people who are addicted to opioids. But right now, the FDA’s standards require clinical trials to show a treatment fosters continuous abstinence from opioids more often than a placebo.



Volkow and her colleagues say that’s difficult to actually do, and can act as an obstacle to medication development.“These barriers must be addressed,” they  write. Their idea: Look at other study goals, like decreased use, rather than continuous abstinence, which they say could drum up more interest from the pharma industry.





Lab Chat: Targeting the weak spot in a bacterial wall



[https://gallery.mailchimp.com/f8609630ae206654824f897b6/images/c1854ea4-b50a-4147-b397-ef4b7a5249c3.gif]



wall-making proteins in blue, and scaffolding proteins in green. (janet iwasa for harvard medical school)



Scientists have discovered a new clue about how bacteria build walls as shields, which offers a potential new target to chip away at their defenses. Here’s what chemist Andrew Kruse of Harvard told me about the work, published in Nature<https://statnews.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f8609630ae206654824f897b6&id=b4adad4dec&e=4aad33fd68>.



What do we know about the walls around bacteria?



The wall helps bacteria protect themselves from their surrounding environment. One of the most effective strategies for antibiotic function has been to disrupt the cell wall by blocking one of the steps in building a cell wall. The research groups I work with discovered there’s a whole family of enzymes involved in synthesizing a cell wall we didn’t know about. So it was a new class of potential antibiotic targets. We characterized it in more detail.



What did that show you?



We found it has a cavity in the center that is essential for function and looks like a really good pocket to target for drug development. We’re hoping to use computational drug discovery methods to find compounds that can bind to this target.





Inside STAT<https://statnews.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f8609630ae206654824f897b6&id=a33170bfda&e=4aad33fd68>: Will freeing health data unleash innovation?



Breakthrough cures aren't just hidden in the mysteries of biology and chemistry anymore — increasingly, they're also stashed in electronic health records. The data in patient files could help researchers drill down into which patients, with which backgrounds and which disease characteristics, respond best to specific treatments. Those secrets are often carefully guarded for the sake of patient privacy and private profit. But the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services is looking to make a simple change that would put patients in charge of their information — and open the data floodgates. STAT's Casey Ross has more here<https://statnews.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f8609630ae206654824f897b6&id=f3f9ec1100&e=4aad33fd68>.





There isn't widespread use of this STI prevention tactic



An estimated 20 million new sexually transmitted infections occur in the U.S. each year — and one way to prevent and control those infections is by doctors talking with patients about their own behaviors and risks. And although the CDC and several big health organizations recommend having that conversation with patients, that doesn't always happen in practice. A new study<https://statnews.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f8609630ae206654824f897b6&id=6652f41935&e=4aad33fd68> from the CDC finds that among people ages 15 to 44 who were recently sexually active, 47 percent of women and just 23 percent of men had a sexual risk assessment with their health care provider in the past year.





What to read around the web today

§  Inside a secret network to provide safe, cheap home abortions. California Sunday<https://statnews.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f8609630ae206654824f897b6&id=3234a6c0fb&e=4aad33fd68>

§  Planned Parenthood receives $9 million gift to open new clinics in West Texas. Dallas Morning News<https://statnews.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f8609630ae206654824f897b6&id=12765cdbff&e=4aad33fd68>

§  Trump’s VA pick is new to all this. Politico





More reads from STAT

§  Surgeon general’s wife treated for melanoma <https://statnews.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f8609630ae206654824f897b6&id=d9701ca062&e=4aad33fd68> recurrence as he highlights risks of tanning.

§  Scientists find mini gastrointestinal tract<https://statnews.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f8609630ae206654824f897b6&id=9863a11b02&e=4aad33fd68> growing inside tumor.





The latest from STAT Plus

§  CAR-T is a personalized attack on cancer. Here’s how it works<https://statnews.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f8609630ae206654824f897b6&id=2ad461a826&e=4aad33fd68>.

§  Vermont transparency pricing law<https://statnews.us11.list-manage.com/track/click?u=f8609630ae206654824f897b6&id=08f2b9a12e&e=4aad33fd68> may show big price hikes, but disappoints lawmakers.









Thanks for reading! More tomorrow,

[Megan]















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